Paper General

$9.00 USD

Welcome to the future! Snapline dusts off one from the vaults, a new two-song slammer with material from the pre-Phenomena (2012), pre-Future Eyes (2011) times, created in their hearts & minds ca. 1982 for a series of never-aired infomercials canonizing China’s proud martial might and technological prowess.

Yes, though the band’s members had only just been born, they were already on the vanguard. This is the sound of disaffected technical university dropouts graduates with honors. This is what’s been in the water. “Paper General” blasts it off at march speed, written for the happiest army in human history. Tens of thousands of men and women standing, smiling like the technicolor postcard you once saw in a kitsch shop. Operators Li Qing and Li Weisi stack the kosmische filter sweeps and pure analog noise generators with Snapline’s trademark loose cohesion. You can almost hear their fingers at the switches! While the picture adjusts (it never quite does), Chen Xi barks the orders. “Turn your radar ON!” His voice is almost lost in the static. Which is the signal and which is the noise? “It could be thousands of ways / to say a word in different tones.”

Next stop: “Wasteland.” The path forward seems infinite but your trip lasts just over seven minutes. Scientific progress sounds like a rickety synthesizer shuttling too close to the sun. Even the control melts. The rhythm is vaporized. It never mattered. Return to earth and you no longer recognize what you once called home. Spin it, flip it, repeat.